The Gambler Is A Winner In Music, Films

For someone who has gambled in his music over the years, Kenny Rogers is playing it safe in his movie career.

This fall he co-stars with Reba McEntire in a four-hour NBC miniseries called "The Gambler 4."

"Who would have believed it?" Rogers chortles over the phone from his Georgia farm, in the soft raspy voice that drives his female fans wild. "I mean, I swore I'd never do `Gambler 2.' "

But Rogers, who turns 50 Wednesday, says he was hooked by a postmodernist premise: "Take my character, Brady Hawks, and re-weave him through American television-Western history."

So on the way to a poker game in San Francisco, he runs into Hugh O'Brian as Wyatt Earp, Gene Barry as Bat Masterson, Chuck Connors as the Rifleman and David Carradine as Kwai Chang Caine in "Kung Fu," among others.

"It's a great story. It's a fun story," Rogers says. But the filming put his normal summer concert schedule out of whack. He appears in three shows tonight and Friday at the Oakdale Musical Theatre in Wallingford.

Not that he wants to concentrate on an acting career, which he so far sums up as "me in Western clothes."

"I have no desire to be an actor who goes out and plays psychos one day and saints the next day. I enjoy doing movies because it gets me away from music for a while. These things have been extremely successful, and I think it just adds a layer to my success that allows me to screw up musically."

Those who concentrate solely on music can't afford such luxuries, he says. "Then, you approach things too cautiously, and you don't allow for growth." With the side projects, the Gambler says, "I can afford to gamble. I can take some chances. And if I'm right, it's high risk, high yield."

Yet it seems his fans are so loyal, they would support his every musical gamble.

"It's awesome to me -- I don't know what the other word would be -- for the loyalty fans have had for me," he says, the silver tongue stammering a bit. "It's very flattering and it's very touching."

The three nearly-sold-out Oakdale shows are the most for any

performer there this year.

Although he's a Texas native, Rogers is probably most comfortable working the Northeast, where the demand is for a less twangy brand of country. "I'm kind of in-between there. It's not country, but it's not too hard rock," he says. "`When you get down to Texas, the trend is more towards more George Strait, Randy Travis, Mark Chestnutt -- the cowboy-hat guys."

Rogers clearly doesn't mind being out of fashion in Nashville. "Success is a very strange thing. If it's constant and it's intense, it's very draining. But when you have ebbs and flows, you can make a run at it, then back off and have privacy, then make a run at it again. Then you have more choice of what you can do with life. That's where your longer careers come in. That's what I've opted for."

Having said that, Rogers has just put the finishing touches on an album he says is "more country than anything I've done in 10 years." But that was just an accident. "I really try to do the very best songs I can find," he says. "These just happened to be a more country group of songs. And I think they're great."

Rogers' career began in high school, when he was part of a band that had a regional hit in "That Crazy Feeling." At the University of Houston, he was in a jazz group, the Bobby Doyle Trio, that recorded on Columbia Records. From there he joined the New Christy Minstrels in 1966. The next year, he broke off with some other Minstrels to form the First Edition, which played some quasi-psychedelia before moving to more country-rock. In all, he's done everything from rock to jazz, pop to psychedelia, country to r&b.

"It's all dictated to me by the song. If I found a song that was hard rock 'n' roll and I thought I could do it, I'd try it. I think there's limitations because of the type of voice I have.

"My strengths are ballads, first of all, that are love songs. I try to find songs that say what every man would like to be able to say and every woman would like to hear. If you do that, you catch everybody -- you catch the men and the women. I think that's what `Lady' and `Through the Years' and `She Believes in Me' and `You Decorated My Life' and those kind of songs do.

"And my other strength, I think, would be the country story songs. Those are songs the men like because they're a little more masculine, bar-drinking songs: `The Gambler' and `Lucille' and `Coward of the County.' If you have that combination, it gives you a well-balanced demographic as well."

Tunes such as "The Gambler" and "Lucille" have transcended mere hitdom to become part of the language. "That is the key to the great song," Rogers says. "If it has something in it that people can lock onto, like `You picked a fine time to leave me, Lucille,' everybody loves that expression. If you find those, the songs do become eternal."